I am happy to announce that effective today, Stephen LaPorte is joining the Foundation as legal counsel in the Legal and Community Advocacy team!  Stephen has been interning with us for a semester, and we're thrilled that he's staying onboard.  We went through a very competitive interview process and he was by far the best candidate for the role.  One of the criteria for this role was that the candidate be a Wikimedian, and Stephen fits that neatly.  As a volunteer, he enjoys de-orphaning articles and cleaning up dead-end pages on the English Wikipedia. He also proofreads on the English Wikisource. He started contributing to Wikipedia in 2008 after working on [[w:Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve]] for a class project.

You'll have the chance to meet him at the Berlin Hack-a-thon, or at Wikimania this summer.  A little bit of background on Stephen: he studied English and Latin at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. He is interested in copyright, privacy, and trademark law. During law school, he worked on the Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal.

Stephen will be helping out with contracts, content/community questions/issues, trademark approvals & licensing, trademark enforcement, and other general matters that come up for lawyers. Stephen will report to me.

This was an extremely competitive process, and we're very lucky to have him join us.